12 Best Mental Health Books to Recenter You

Many of us weren’t raised with the number one thing that protects us: boundaries! “Set Boundaries, Find Peace” has aided readers with the best ways to implement healthy boundaries with family, romantic relationships, friends and at work. Nedra Glover Tawwab does a deep dive in explaining why boundaries are needed in every relationship to keep everyone safe. She equips readers with language to communicate boundaries respectfully, readjust boundaries when needed and communicate when boundaries are violated.

It’s only right to invest in Tawaab’s “Set Boundaries Workbook” to understand how to practice setting boundaries in all areas of your life. The best way to learn how to communicate your boundaries when you aren’t used to them is to practice exercises to understand your needs and set proper limits to create more ease and comfort in your life. It also does a great job advising readers to be more accountable regarding tone and how to analyze blind spots they may have while respecting other people’s boundaries.

Nedra’s books, “Set Boundaries, Find Peace” and “Set Boundaries Workbook,” go hand in hand. “Set Boundaries, Find Peace” explains more in-depth why boundaries are needed in all relationships and why not having them can cost us staying in loops of unhealthy cycles. The book thoroughly explains the different types of boundaries, like porous, rigid and healthy boundaries.

She also encourages readers that, though they’ve gone through their own trauma, being enmeshed with others won’t heal them. Your only savior is you once you’re willing to make the changes needed.

Her workbook provides practical exercises to help readers think through the legitimate steps to implement those boundaries. If you process your feelings more via journaling, the workbook will make you dive deeper than her first book, answering her self-evaluating prompts. The workbook lets us ponder and self-reflect on understanding our unique needs and learning when to set and gauge healthy limits when we feel safer in a relationship. We all need different things to thrive in relationships with ourselves and others. The best we can do is respect each other’s limits and commit to growing more day by day.

Emotions carry a significant amount of information if we choose to sit with them and understand them thoroughly. Even the feelings that tend to be unwanted — like anger, shame, anxiety, trauma, loneliness and grief — hold an enormous amount of wisdom and life lessons. Karla McLaren elaborates on the profound purpose of working through our emotions, learning how to emotionally regulate, collect data from our feelings and allow our emotions to teach us. “The Language of Emotions” is a phenomenal book that will increase emotional intelligence and give tips on improving our relationships with our loved ones.

“Think Like a Monk” takes readers through author Jay Shetty’s years of experience being a monk — exploring his timeless wisdom and advising feasible tips on training your mind to prioritize purpose and peace. Shetty explains multiple monk rituals and ties them to how we can apply them to our daily lives — like working through comparison, exploring the power of meditation and leading with gratitude in all we do.

My favorite part of the book is the self-reflective questions he challenges readers to try via journaling. Shetty encourages readers to work through multiple challenging mindsets that hold us back, like learning to stop living on other people’s terms and living on terms that work best for you. He also sheds light on combating overthinking, working through procrastination, and being open to finding our purpose in different seasons of our lives.

If you’re struggling with unwanted intrusive thoughts or learning to support a loved one working through a similar problem, this book can be life-changing! Years ago, I was that person struggling with intrusive thoughts. They’re the number one thing that made me commit to learning about my mind and being endlessly curious about rewiring it.

Winston and Martin are anxiety experts who provide practical cognitive behavior therapy skills to help redirect your mind from disturbing thoughts, reducing your anxiety and working through the shame these thoughts come with. The truth is millions of sane people suffer from unwanted intrusive thoughts. The more we learn to speak to those thoughts, the less fuel those thoughts will have to continue the same cycle.

This empathic guide will teach you the myths around thoughts and how our brain has the urge to go down the rabbit hole of negative thoughts. There is hope! These thoughts do have an ending if we’re open to dealing with them head-on.

“Clarity & Connection” is at the top of my list to recommend to people when it comes to understanding their conscious and subconscious minds. Yung Pueblo prompts his self-exploration narrative in poetry style, pushing readers to examine their past and learn how to be at peace with it to grow into a new version of themselves. “Clarity and Connection” is the second book in Pueblo’s “Inward” series, focusing on heightening self-awareness and creating healthier patterns in your romantic partnerships.

“Drama Free” is a must-read enlightening guide written by bestselling relationship expert and licensed therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab. She gives stellar advice on breaking family cycles that no longer serve you and identifying dysfunctional family patterns. Tawwab focuses on the roots of neglect, addiction, abuse, boundary violations, enmeshment and repeating cycles subconsciously. She gives thorough conflict resolution tips to work through with your immediate and extended family.

This book elaborates on how influential conditional behavior is. As humans, we often do what we see. Change is possible if we seek new, healthy tools to change the dysfunctional habits we subconsciously picked up from our families. Tawwab explains why therapists often ask us about our childhood. It gives them context regarding why we value what we value. Were we gaslit? Are we open to being vulnerable? Did we have emotionally mature parents?

“Drama Free” dives into the importance of speaking up for yourself. It explains how, in dysfunctional families, shaming others is normal to control others. But, through the shame, your boundaries are needed. Just because we may have to coexist with unhealthy family members that do not want to change doesn’t mean we can’t change our reaction to them.

This book is vital for creating healthy unity with our loved ones. We may have been a child in a dysfunctional family, but now we’re an adult with the option to make healthy choices to live the life we want to create. Family doesn’t mean blood; it means safety. You can create that for yourself and have a community to support you along that journey.

Suppose you recall your childhood feeling like an endless pit of being misunderstood, getting your feelings dismissed, and feeling abandoned emotionally and physically. In that case, you most likely are an adult child of emotionally immature parents.

In her book, Gibson elaborates on the four complex types of parents:

the emotional parent, who instills anxiety and instability
the driven parent, who is the perfectionate
the passive parent, who avoids complicated situations
the rejecting parent, who is often dismissive and withdraws.

“Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents” teach readers how to regulate their reactions and expectations and bypass disappointment. It’s possible to heal from the situations we experienced in the nest, create healthier relationships, and have our needs met elsewhere.

Traditional masculinity is often enmeshed with toxic masculinity, from teaching little boys to “man up,” masking heavy emotions, don’t you dare cry, normalizing abuse and fulfilling the endless need of being “the provider and protector” all in one. “Patriarchy Blues: Reflections on Manhood” contains intriguing poems, essays and short reflections from author Frederick Joseph, challenging the patriarchal system from a Black man’s perspective. Joseph encourages men of color to be open to feeling joy, working through the pain, being open to therapy and combating stereotypes.

“Self Care for Black Men” is a self-care guide packed with activities for Black men looking to create healthy connections, pursue happiness living in a world that often limits their access to it, confront racism, manage their relationships and work through generational trauma. Black men are frequently overlooked in the areas of care. They are often painted criminal first and human second. Our judicial system usually targets them and murders them at immense rates.

Then they are subjected to a layer of prejudices at work. They struggle to find mental health resources because there are limited options of self-care assistance for men in comparison to women. Caraballo’s words provide healing, encourage deep reflection, and help men learn new skills to manage their mental health.

If you’re tired of the micro and macro aggressions at work, school or in the grocery store, and are irritated by the lack of resources for Latinas, this book is for you! Self-Care for Latinas speaks to the unique Latina woman’s experience, encouraging mental and physical self-care.

This self-care guide is filled with 100 exercises to suggest putting yourself first. Reichard equips readers to assertively correct the pronunciation of their name to others, combat stereotypes, make space to process trauma, work through the micro and macro aggressions, and more than anything else, it teaches Latina readers to create more space for joy!

“Where I Belong” puts a magnifying glass on mental health issues that are often ignored in immigrant families and in Asian and Asian American communities. Co-authors Lee and Yoon encourage Asian communities to understand their family history and process their intergenerational and racial trauma. Both authors use several examples from their Asian lineage to help the Asian diaspora feel more connected and seen processing their specific realities. This unique guide provides vital therapeutic tools, journal prompts, contemplative questions and thought-provoking exercises to encourage readers to analyze their resilience among generations and embrace their culture and identity.